Prof. Sriya Iyer

Prof. Sriya Iyer (Ph.D., University of Cambridge) is the Janeway Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Economics of Religion in India (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Demography and Religion in India (Oxford University Press, 2002).



You have written a lot about economics and religion. Were you interested in religion or in economics first, and what brought these two into contact?

I was interested in economics first as it is a great subject that teaches us a lot about concepts such as incentives, trade-offs, how people make decisions, and so forth. Coming from India, I was very aware of inequality around me - not just economic, but also social and institutional inequality. This got me interested more generally in how economics could be used to understand social problems. My interest in religion as a scholarly subject came later when I was doing my doctoral studies. I was curious to see if methods from economics such as economic theory and statistics could also be used to understand religion in different parts of the world, to complement studies which were done in other disciplines, and if economics as a subject could contribute more to inter-disciplinary dialogues about religion.

What are the differences—if any—between how economics is taught in India and in other countries?

Economics as a subject is taught very similarly in India as it is in the UK or the US. The core principles of the subject - microeconomics, macroeconomics, statistics - are taught similarly, and many students are fortunate to have great teachers who first introduce them to the subject. But where you live also has an effect on how you might apply economics to study the real world. And if you do come from a developing country, you may be interested to see how these fundamental economic principles can be used to help real people in the real world with their problems - be it poverty, inequality, access to basic goods like food, shelter, education, healthcare and so forth. Sometimes what you observe growing up around you can motivate your interest in a particular economics subject many years down the line.

Prof. Alvin Roth

Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2012 and is best known for his work on kidney exchange markets. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University.


In The Graduate, a character says to Dustin Hoffman as he is about to finish school and head out into the world, “I want to say one word to you, just one word,” and that one word is “Plastics,” because, he says, “there’s a great future in plastics.” If you were to say “just one word” to a young person thinking about being an economist, what would that word be?

“Computerized-markets.”

[For Roth’s own work on computerized markets, see here, here, here, and here.

For other advice he gives to young economists, here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9SLiRpUNsc

The famous scene from The Graduate can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dug-G9xVdVs ]

Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen (Ph.D., Australian National University) is a widely published policy economist and public intellectual who has had regular columns in the Courier Mail, the Australian Financial Review, and the Sydney Morning Herald. He is the founder of Lateral Economics.



 
If you could mandate that every student read one book in the field of economics, what would it be?

While I read plenty of economics books, almost invariably my ideas are cooked up in my head and talking to people – and this is a big deal for me. Most people think economics is 75% learning the discipline and 25% applying the ideas. I’d say it’s the other way round. Most of the important stuff comes in the way (usually pretty commonplace) ideas are deployed. A lot of economists are quite unaware of this. Thus for instance, as I try to document here, they’ll deploy arguments like competitive neutrality in one way, blissfully, unware that they could be applied in other ways. Virtually all my work comes from applying in somewhat new ways the simple and powerful ideas of our discipline that any economics graduate would recognise. For instance here’s how I deploy the idea of public and private goods in a slightly new way to generate what I think is a powerful way to see the economy and powerful new policy possibilities.  

                                                                             

But if you want me to pick a book, I’d suggest John Kay’s The Truth about Markets (I think it may have had a different title in the US). It’s not more brilliant than other books or a stand out classic, but it’s a compelling romp through many of the important ideas in economics with a lot of moderation and commonsense at the same time as positive zeal for good, practical ideas and the huge contribution economics can make to improving millions – indeed billions – of ordinary human lives.

If you’d allow me to indulge myself and stray somewhat outside economics, but at least into political economy I’d also recommend David Van Reybrouk’s Against Elections, which explains some of the myriad problems with electoral democracy and proposes instead democracy by sortition – as occurs in juries in court cases. I’ve set out similar ideas and a model constitution in which power is shared between elected representatives and those selected by lot (based in a Westminster or British parliamentary system rather than a US congressional one) here and here.

A book I’m reading right now and loving is Matthew Crawford’s The World beyond your Head, which I thoroughly recommend.   

What course that is not normally required for an undergraduate economics major do you think all students should be required to take, and why?

I think the history of economic thought should be compulsory because it gives students perspective into other ways of looking at things. I have no problems with neoclassical economics being taught, but I’m dead against it being taught as the only way to do economics. Since it is so often taught that way, the history of economic thought can provoke some curiosity in students to look further afield. However even here if it is taught as if all previous economists were really just groping their way towards the way we think today then students can be largely protected from the good it can do them. 

Indeed, for me it was my study of history proper – not economic history or the history of ideas – that helped me understand something about ideas that Steven Jobs commented upon:

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were [in general] no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.

I outlined some of the influence studying history had on me briefly in the midst of a longish speech here (in Section V) and also here.

Joseph Sternberg

Joseph C. Sternberg is editorial-page editor and Political Economics columnist for the Wall Street Journal's European edition. His latest book is The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future (Public Affairs, 2019).



As a journalist, which aspects of economics are the most difficult to communicate?

The top thing is how little economists actually know. If you read any serious academic paper or book, there's a certain humility about the limits of any one model, and also about the limits of the data they have to work with. The problem is that when you're a journalist, you're keenly aware that your audience is busy and only has a few minutes to spend with you each day. You want to be able to give them a simple, actionable bottom line -- "If you increase X by 10%, economists say Y will decrease by 30%" or the like. Economics can't really do that, though. The paper on which that sentence is based actually says something like "If you increase X by 10%, an analysis of the particular data set we used found that 95% of the time Y will decrease by 30%, but that data set also suffers from A, B and C shortcomings that make it hard for us to understand precisely what's going on." You can see how difficult it is to put that into a news article or an opinion column, so it's a challenge to present readers with suggestive data points while also finding elegant, non-technical ways to alert readers to the pitfalls.

An explosion in the quantity of data available for analysis over the past century and the development of new tools with which to analyze it have been tremendous boons to a lot of policy debates where we no longer need to fly completely blind. But it all tends to cultivate an unhealthy impression that economics is a more precise "science" than it truly is. And I fear some economists are happy to play along with that because it boosts their perceived authority as public intellectuals.

What responses to the book have surprised you the most?

I'd expected response to the book would split along partisan lines. I came at the topic from a more free-market perspective than has been applied to a lot of intergenerational challenges up to now (as you'd expect for a Wall Street Journal editorial-page writer), and I had thought the main dividing line between who liked the book and who didn't like it would be along the left-right axis. Instead, I've been surprised by the extent to which the split is more along generational lines. Millennial readers from the political left might not agree with my policy prescriptions, but my description of the economic problems facing Millennials still rings true to them. Whereas Boomer conservatives push back hard on the message even though I'm part of their own political "tribe" on so many other issues. It's too easy for them to fall back on calling Millennials "snowflakes" and accusing us of whining, instead of recognizing that the economic challenges our generation faces are unique.